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A macabre collection

Just inside the entranceway to this truly bizarre room, the skeleton of an African Mountain Gorilla has been hunched down in a knuckle-dragging stance for going on seven decades.

From within a phone-booth-sized glass casing, his hollow eye sockets turn their empty gaze out over a macabre congregation of more highly evolved primate cousins.

Well, bits and pieces of them anyway.

Chopped up into every conceivable anatomical chunk, and displayed at every imaginable angle, the human specimens that make up the JCB Grant Anatomy Museum at the University of Toronto number well into the hundreds.

Bathed in soft light and formaldehyde, these grisly exemplars of bone and tissue, skulls, faces and colons, represent one of the most important collections of body parts in all of medical history.

They are the still-life models for Grant's Atlas of Anatomy, which has reigned since 1943 as one of the classic, indispensable geographies of the human body for medical students and physicians across the globe.

"It (the atlas) is still making millions," says Charlie Storton, 91, who was responsible for dissecting most of the museum's specimens. "It's the standard atlas around the world." Dr. Michael Wiley, chair of anatomy at the school, says the legacy of Dr. John Charles Boileau Grant, the museum's founder, has survived through 11 printings of the atlas.

As opposed to the more famous Gray's Anatomy – a word-heavy textbook that includes anatomical illustrations – Grant's presents a bare-bones visual mapping of every body part with little accompanying commentary.

Grant was a Scottish anatomist who came to the U of T via Winnipeg in 1930. At the time, his collection represented a dynamic new way of studying the human body.

"The whole idea of the anatomy museum was that it was set up to be very interactive," says John Albanese, a University of Windsor anthropologist who has studied the U of T museum.

"It was quite revolutionary at the time. In the '20s and '30s there was a very hands-off approach to anatomy instructions and there were a few people like Grant who set up collections specifically for (hands-on) teaching."

The collection of cadavers was a dark business for centuries, with grave robbers and execution yards providing the bulk of anatomy specimens. But by the middle of the 19th century, widespread laws cut off those unsavoury supply lines, Albanese says.

In the late 1800s, Ontario began to allow the use of unclaimed – and usually unidentified – bodies that would otherwise require a government sponsored burial.

It was these sad and anonymous paupers who provided most of the museum's body parts, now bleached a pale grey from decades in formaldehyde.

"But they weren't always paupers that we used," says Storton, who estimates that dozens of bodies are represented in the museum, located in the basement of the U of T's medical sciences building.

"We had a fellow who arrived here in a bronze casket, he had willed his body."

Another corpse belonged to a young and healthy-looking female, who died mysteriously in the Royal York Hotel in the 1930s, Storton says. "Nobody knew who she was, so we got her."

When Grant began preparing his atlas in the late 1930s, most similar texts were being produced in Germany. But this supply dried up for British and North American scholars with the onset of World War II.

"They (the Germans) wouldn't let them out of the country," Storton says. "And you had these young (medical) graduates who had to go right out and work on wounded soldiers, so that's why Dr. Grant had to undertake the atlas." Organized by body regions rather than systems, the museum traipses – along bays of shelving – from chest to abdomen to pelvis to upper and lower limbs and so on.

The specimens, many now entering their seventh decade, are coated with gelatine and cleaned and topped with formaldehyde on a regular basis.

"As long as our technical staff keep proper care of the specimens, they'll keep indefinitely," says Wiley, who walks through the museum at least twice a day and regards many of the specimens as "old friends."

Along with typical anatomical areas and organs, the museum also includes myriad examples of diseased tissues, many added after Grant died in 1973.

"Here's a particular condition known as Hydronephrosis where the (tubes) that drain urine from the kidneys are distended and swollen," Wiley says, stopping before one of the museum's glass cases.

"And these are interesting specimens, we have a number of fused kidneys, which is an anomaly that affects many people where the kidneys are fused into a single organ."

Another pathological exhibit – this one particularly off-putting – shows a rare benign tumour known as a teratoma in which any kind off tissue can grow. This particular teratoma – found near a woman's ovary – contains both hair and teeth.

Storton says Grant insisted that any student coming into the museum treat the specimens with "the utmost of respect" – a requirement and practice that continues to this day.

On a recent day, students from Toronto's Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine wandered among the specimens with studious humility.

"As long as you enter this place with a sense of gratitude and reverence, then you can learn from it and it serves its purpose," says Dylan Jones, 28, a first-year student at the college.

Wiley says the popular Body Worlds show at the Ontario Science Centre last year was marvellous. "But the main thought I came away with was that it was a real missed opportunity for education." he says.

"There was too much emphasis on the weird poses and they missed a real opportunity to teach anatomy to the public."

The more homely Grant collection, on the other hand, has been an anatomy teaching machine.

Aside from the atlas it spawned, the collection is still a must-see curriculum stop for U of T medical and dental students and for others training in such professions as chiropractics, speech and language pathology, art and physical therapy. More than 1,000 students use the facility each year.

But how much value will the museum retain in a computerized teaching world that is rapidly developing three-dimensional images of every body part?

"I think at the end of the day you can't do better than actually having the students (see the real thing)," Wiley says.

As well, he says, digital files will typically show one example of an anatomical part. The museum, he says, presents pieces from dozens of different people, giving students a sense of the variation that exists in all biology.

As for Storton, who now lives in a Toronto nursing home, there's still evident pride in his voice as he discusses the museum and atlas, which gives him credit.

"But I wish I had made some money out of it," he jokes. "I did all the work."

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